T.H. Green and the Dissidence of Dissent: On Religion and National Character in Nineteenth‐Century England

Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) has been widely recognized for his contributions to Liberal political‐social theory and for his Liberal partisanship. Historians and political theorists continue to emphasize his advocacy of limited state interference and democratic localism, as well as his anti‐imperialist statements. Recent scholars of English nationalism, national identity and patriotism, including Peter Mandler, Julia Stapleton, Krishan Kumar, H.S. Jones, Roberto Romani and Georgios Varouxakis, acknowledge Green as an acolyte of Giuseppe Mazzini, a Cobdenite and a Little Englander. While they place Green's ideas within a continuum of Victorian Liberal nationalist ideas (blending into Conservatism and socialism during the 20th century), their investigations foster the view that Green placed little value in the nation as a focus of individual and collective identification. In their readings of Green, the abstract ‘community’, free of national peculiarities, was to him the antidote to both individual and national narrowness. However, examination of Green's statements about community, the moral ideal and religion reveals that his theorising was informed by a view of national character different from that of most contemporary liberal intellectuals. Green rejected the ‘Liberal anglican’ view that a national church or clerisy was necessary to guide the development of the English nation. He identified ideas and practices of protestant dissenters as progressive forces in English history and endorsed them as means of national development. Religious pluralism and forms of ecclesiastical organisation promoting democratic localism were to Green among the essential characteristics of Englishness.     

Matthew Paris on the writing of history

Matthew Paris was one of the most prolific and influential historians of the central middle ages. Matthew's significance rests both on the range of his interests and the scope of his writing. Yet, even basic questions about his outlook on writing, his concept of history, or the relationship with his audience, have hardly been asked. These issues are central themes of this article, and will be used to consider wider questions about Matthew's concept of truth, his handling of information, and his view of the world around him. The article, furthermore, extends coverage beyond the Chronica majora or Matthew's vernacular writings to consider his concept of history as it emerges from the totality of his oeuvre.     

Noticeboard

Recent years have seen a marked growth of interest in Jewish medieval history. It is no longer considered tenable to study the history of the Latin West without taking some account of the place of the Jews in medieval Europe. This article explores different trends in recent research on medieval Jewish-Christian coexistence by examining a number of books and editions of texts which have been published in this field since 1990.     

Technology and ocean‐scape: Defining the deep sea in mid‐nineteenth century

The ocean's profound inaccessibility makes it impossible to comprehend except through the mediation of technology. The first investigators to explore the great depths were hydrographers whose work was animated by mid‐nineteenth century growth of political, economic, and cultural interest in the oceans. While submarine telegraphy certainly boosted ocean science, interest in this field derived first from commercial concerns related to whaling and shipping as well as the intellectual pursuits of physical geography and questions about the existence of life at great depths. Hydrographers’ developing conception of the oceanic environment never represented a clear translation from technology. Dramatic changes in the understanding of the shape of the deep‐sea floor testified to the complexity of interaction between sounding machines, methods, and interpretations of depth. The shifting image of the sea floor not only reflected increasingly accurate measurements, but also mirrored shifting human motivations for studying this unexplored territory.     

Editorial

For John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and their later Victorian respondents, the Stoic writer and second-century CE Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius represented a test-case for the sufficiency of the ostensibly masculine practices of askesis and detachment as ethical ideals, specifically in the context of Christianity. A brief passage in Mill's On Liberty (1859) comparing Stoic ethics with Christian ethical practice provoked an extended response from Arnold in an 1863 review essay. Mill and Arnold both used comparisons with Christianity to trace the contours and to explore the limits of Marcus Aurelius's ‘lovable’ nature; in doing so, Arnold in particular enacted a peculiar kind of historical sympathy for both the Marcus Aurelius that was and for a missed rapprochement between classical and Christian ethics. For a series of later writers, including freethinkers, religious conservatives and liberal Christians, Marcus Aurelius either promised or threatened to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity. Assessing the emperor in the light of Christianity became a means both for producing or denying a link to the classical past and for describing the condition of Christianity in England. A key point of contention for these writers and a landmark in the broader debate over Victorian secularization was the question of Marcus Aurelius' role in the torture and killing of 48 Christians at Lugdunum (Lyons) in 177 CE.     

Matthew Flinders through French Eyes: Nicolas Baudin’s Lessons from Encounter Bay

The encounter between Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders off the south coast of New Holland in April 1802 has attracted considerable attention. For many, it has come to symbolise the triumph of the spirit of international scientific cooperation over national rivalries and personal ambitions. Scholarly analysis of the complexities of the encounter moment itself has, however, served to modify this idealised image. The injustice subsequently done to Flinders by François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, who failed to acknowledge his discoveries on this coast in the published account of the French voyage, has also generated much discussion. The impact of the encounter on Baudin and his men, on the other hand, has not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Through a close examination of the archival documentation, this essay offers the French perspective on Matthew Flinders and highlights the ramifications for the Baudin expedition of this fateful meeting with him.     

Schooling the Quantum Generations: Textbooks and Quantum Cultures from the 1910s to the 1930s

Ever since Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), textbooks have suffered a bad reputation. They have been accused of distorting—at times purportedly—history and of feeding students with an unacceptably simplified and optimistic view of science. This attitude started to change only in recent times. With the increase of attention paid not only to how theories are conceived, but also how they are practiced, disseminated, and appropriated, historians have rehabilitated textbooks as a legitimate site of knowledge production. In this paper, I adopt textbooks as an instrument to unfold multiple facets of the culture that allowed quantum physics to flourish between 1900 and the early 1930s. I organize the article around two stories about two major textbooks, i.e., Sommerfeld′s Atombau und Spektrallinien and Dirac′s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. I explore the complex pedagogical cultures underlying these two masterpieces and how they intersect local agendas.     

Tell el-Hesi: A type site for reevaluating so-called ‘Egyptian Governors’ Residencies’ of the south

In 1984 Eliezer Oren identified a series of structures found at 13th and 12th centuries BCE sites of southern Canaan, calling them Egyptian Governors’ Residencies. He identified Bliss’s City IV as a defining site. In 2000 Blakely identified Petrie’s Pilaster Building as a second example from Tell el-Hesi. It is now clear that Bliss’s City IV dates to the 13th century and that some of its architectural elements were salvaged after its destruction to build Petrie’s Pilaster Building in the 12th century. All of the southern examples are found in an agricultural zone of uncertainty where there is no clear likelihood of a harvestable crop in any given normal year. As it happens, the 13th and especially the 12th centuries BCE were far from normal, being a period of drought and extreme drought. Thus no crops could have been expected. This suggests the structures could not have been centres for the collection of a grain harvest tax, the accepted view. Rather, one wonders if the sites did not monitor a large pasturage.     

Matthew Clark and the Beginnings of Chart Publishing in the United States

ABSTRACT

At the end of the eighteenth century Boston, Massachusetts, emerged as a centre of chart publishing in the United States. With little cartographic experience among them, Bartholomew Burges, John Norman and, later, Matthew Clark undertook a publishing venture that resulted in the first atlas of sea charts made in the United States. The research presented here redefines the roles of the principals and examines the atlas's relationship to other Boston publications.